In order to use correlation for a dissertation study, there are certain assumptions that need to be met. The assumptions include linearity, no outliers, normality, homoscedasticity, and independence of observations. Linearity means that the relationship between two variables is linear, or can be represented by a straight line. No outliers means that there are no extreme data points that could affect the results of the analysis. Normality means that the data is normally distributed, meaning that it is bell-shaped when plotted on a graph. Homoscedasticity means that the variance of the data is equal across all data points. Finally, independence of observations means that there is no correlation between any two observations, and that each observation is independent of the others